Hey.
We have hit our time, so I think we will kick things off. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. My name is David Sunderland. I cover sustainable energy and mobility here at Baird with my partner, Ben Kalo. Very happy to have the team here from PHINIA, who's going to lead a presentation, including CFO Chris Gropp and CEO Brady Ericson. Thank you guys very much for being here. It's a small enough room. Don't be shy. Feel free to raise your hand and interrupt at any time with questions. If you would prefer, you can email session4@rwbaird.com, and I'll get them on the iPad here and can pass them along to the team. Maybe with that, thank you again, guys, for being here. I will turn it over to you for an overview.
Great. Thank you very much. Thanks for being here. Forward-looking statements. Yeah, I think you guys all know that. Just a quick overview. We're about a $3.4 billion company, 12,000 employees, kind of located all around the world. We generally produce and sell within the region for all of our customers. We're what we consider a diversified industrial because we're serving aftermarket, light vehicle, off-highway construction, commercial vehicle, across fuel systems, some electrical systems, and aftermarket support. You guys may recognize the brand Delphi. That's our brand. We sell under the Delphi brand most of our components, along with Delco Remy and Hartridge for some of our test equipment. When we talk about diversification, this is what we're really kind of talking about. One, the diversification of the markets in which we serve.
You can see light passenger vehicle, OE, light commercial vehicle, commercial vehicle, which is mainly medium duty, heavy duty, and other, which will include industrial, construction, ag, aerospace. Obviously, just 34% of it is going to be in that service portion of it, which is the independent aftermarket and original equipment service. That original equipment service is going to be going through the dealerships, whether it's GM, Volvo Truck, Daimler, and the such. We also have good diversification across regions, Americas and Europe, right around that 40%. Asia is a little bit light for us because we also have a joint venture in India that's just over $200 million. That's unconsolidated. When you throw that in there, it gets a little more balanced. We're pretty lean as far as our organizational structure. You can see here, the bulk of our operations are in best-cost countries.
It's really in Americas. We're in Mexico and Brazil. In Asia, it's obviously China and India. Europe, we're scattered kind of around the country, both Eastern Europe and Western Europe. We think we have a pretty good footprint. We have the right number of facilities to support our customers in the regions where they need us. You'll see here a broad array of products for both commercial and industrial, light passenger vehicle, as well as a large offering of alternative fuels, whether it's 100% ethanol, methanol, hydrogen, natural gas, e-fuels, really any type of liquefied or gaseous fuel we'll have a fuel injection system for. That is then supported by our aftermarket because these are parts that are wear items that are generally going to be replaced anywhere from two to four times in their lifetime. That feeds a nice aftermarket business for us.
What brings a lot of these all together for the OEMs is the fact that we can give them both the software, the calibration services, and support to give them a turnkey solution. We actually get nearly $100 million a year of fees from our customers and governments for these services. That is why our net R&D is about 3%, but gross is about 6%. From an overall kind of expectation, this is what we kind of gave out a little while ago, was our expectation is from 2021 through 2023, our average organic growth rate is going to be in that 2%-4% range. Expect to continue to see strong margins in the 14%-15% range, strong cash flow generation. We are maintaining a net leverage of about 1.5%. We are currently about 1.4% right now.
We've been hitting just over $240 million last year in free cash flow. Midpoint of our target range, I think this year is about $190 million. There were some timing benefits that we had last year with some of the refinancing of our debt that kind of helped out. We think in general, we're going to be a consistent GDP, GDP plus type grower, strong cash flows, and strong capital allocation and return to shareholders. That's kind of hit here as far as how we're creating the value. It's really around being product leaders, not technology leaders for technology's sake, but actually adding value and creating technology that brings value to our customers. Good, stable, strong growth, being continued to be financially disciplined, and again, extremely focused on shareholder return.
If you take a look at our stock, you can see we have done a lot to return to shareholders. Our stock price has been doing well. We are still in the education process to transition them from thinking that we are a light vehicle OEM to more of an industrial tier one supplier. I think it is over $500 million now returned to shareholders since we spun in July of 2023. We have repurchased nearly 20% of our shares in that time frame as well. I think I have hit a lot of these topics already as far as a strong balance sheet, great return on competitive capital return. Our area of growth is really focused on alternative fuels, electronics, CV and off-highway markets, and doing some strategic tuck-in kind of M&A as well that makes sense for us. Our first acquisition was SEM, Electromagnet Invest.
It's an ignition company. Their technology is really focused on commercial vehicle and alternative fuels. This is not a technology for light passenger vehicle. Whether it's Cummins is a big customer, Volvo and others that do natural gas engines. We thought that was a nice tuck-in acquisition for us, about $50 million in revenue. We paid what we consider a fair valuation, just less than five times multiple. We're trading right around that six times. It kind of made sense for us as part of that overall system. Our ECU and our software and calibration is actually going to control this ignition system along with our fuel injection system. It allows us to provide a better offering to our customers.
All right. Third quarter, we felt was quite a good quarter for us, $908 million in sales, which was up 8% year over year. Now, within that 8% in the sales, we all know there's been a lot of stuff going on this year: tariffs, FX. We did the acquisition. If I strip out just the FX and also the acquisition of SEM, we would have still been up 5%. If I also strip out tariffs, we would have been up about 3% in the quarter, which for our product base, we thought was quite a good quarter. We were quite happy with the units: $133 million in adjusted EBITDA, which came in at 14.6%. As Brady showed you a little bit earlier, just right in that midpoint of the 14%-15% that we feel we should be.
A good quarter, 14% on the segment operating margins. The units did a really nice job on their returns. As Brady said over and over, I'm a balance sheet girl. I like really clean balance sheets that are doing what they need to do and providing the cash that we need. We ended the quarter with just under $350 million in cash, which is actually up slightly from Q2, despite the fact that we did an acquisition, not a big one, but a small acquisition. We returned to shareholders $41 million between repurchases and dividends, adjusted diluted earnings per share of $1.59. We felt it was a good quarter overall. Updated outlook, it's not a lot of changes, to be fair. The biggest changes, as I said earlier this year, are going to be tariffs and FX.
We took sales up a little bit and narrowed it just a tad, mainly related to ongoing FX and tariff issues. EBITDA coming in really where we expected it to be. We have narrowed the range just a little bit. Again, coming from the beginning of this year, we're really within where we expected to be when we put the guidance out at the first of the year this year. The only thing that has really kind of thrown a curveball have again been tariffs and FX, which has affected the EBITDA margin percentage. We do have dilution in that percentage. The dollars have stayed, and we've kept that where we expected at the beginning of the year and from our original guidance. It's just the percentage is diluted. In the quarter, it was diluted by about 30 basis points because of the tariffs overall.
Adjusted free cash flow has been a really good number for us. As Brady said, it is down from last year only because when we refinanced, it pushed out some of our interest payments, and we had a little cash coming off of that. Overall, this is where we expect to be right now in the $200 million range. We took both ends of that up. We are looking at the higher end of our range from our original guidance. Our tax rate continues to come down. I know it is still eye-popping, but considering where we started after spend, it still continues to be a good story. The groups are really working hard to get that down. We see that getting into what would be considered a reasonable range within the next couple of years.
Great.
That is it.
Good overview. All right. Several questions to jump back to. Maybe first just on tariffs as it has disrupted the whole space, maybe auto supply more than any other space this year. I guess first, just at a high level, any tariff thoughts on what's embedded in your outlook, how you're thinking about business planning for eventual 2026 guidance, which I don't think you've given yet.
Not yet.
Okay. Maybe just what the puts and takes are looking ahead. I guess I'll dive into a few others from there.
The total tariff for the full year, we're looking at in the range of about $40 million, $40-$50 million range in terms of what we're getting back from customers. That's almost exactly the same as the amount of expense. We're expecting that to be. It's a drag on the percentage, but it's not going to be a drag on our total dollars of EBITDA. That's still tracking. It started out obviously slow because we took the tariff hit and then we had to get agreements on pass-throughs to our customers. Those are in place. Now it's just working through and completing that and getting that out for the full year.
Yeah. I mean, the team's done a really good job to kind of pass those through. I think in general, our overall exposure is probably better than some of our peers in the fact that we generally design, develop, source, produce, and sell within the region, north of 80%. There is only going to be a little bit of it that's going to be impacted. From a strategy standpoint, I think everyone is really just focused on making sure everything's USMCA compliant. We have a little bit of our products that are not. We are aggressively moving to get those USMCA compliant. With the USMCA negotiations kind of starting and going into next year, we're protecting the CFA if that percentage has to go up in order to maintain that USMCA compliance. We are working on that as well.
You just started to answer the next question I was going to ask, but maybe I guess two-part question looking at mix. You had the geographic slide up there earlier about customers. Have you seen any notable shift in your end markets as a result of tariffs, or do you anticipate a material change going forward? I guess my second-part question refers to your comments earlier about footprint. Are you evaluating any changes to your footprint and manufacturing given the policy environment?
Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of product that we still have in Europe primarily that does ship into North America. Customers are asking, "Hey, does that make sense to move that over?" Those are very highly engineered, high capital intensity product lines that may or may not make sense even with the tariffs in place. We are evaluating it.
I think in general, there's been no knee-jerk reactions by customers or anybody else to, "Hey, we're going to ship everything," because these are processes. If we do start the process, it's going to take two to three years to really get it over and up and running because these are primarily around our commercial vehicle diesel product. We're holding plus or minus half a micron tolerances. This is not easy stuff. It's not something you can just pick up and move. That's kind of part of it. Are we evaluating different options, longer-term options? We are. As I mentioned, we've got a pretty good footprint already. We have some excess space in pretty much all of our facilities that we can squeeze other things into where it makes sense.
The teams continue to drive lean operations to create more and more space so we can bring in more product. There is no real need for us, I think, to go out and build new plants necessarily. That said, I think we are building a new plant in India, but that is just moving out of an existing facility because it was just a really poor facility that just did not meet our standards. We were better. We are actually, I think, doubling the size of the footprint of our operations in India because we won a number of new pieces of business there. We see still a tremendous amount of growth in the combustion space.
Sure.
On, wait, let me hit the tariffs because that's really more on the fuel system side. On the aftermarket side, we aren't sourcing a lot out of China that's coming into the U.S. About 50% of our aftermarket is internally produced coming out of the fuel system side. That's safe because that's really not coming in from out of country. We did have to change some points, such as where we had some business in Canada. Instead of shipping it into the U.S. and holding it in a warehouse, we had to move it into a warehouse in Canada. Small things like that. We've had a couple of suppliers that we did have out of China, but we've shifted those to other facilities that our suppliers had where they're producing them, and they were able to ship those.
There's been minor things, but there's not been any large material footprint issues.
Maybe last question on tariffs, then we can move to something a little bit more fun. Recognizing that you haven't given a 2026 outlook, I guess I don't want to ask for what can't be given, but just thinking directionally about how you're planning when we're in an environment where, well, things change day to day. Just directionally, the differences in tariff that you expect for next year, or even if you want to loop in some of the FX headwinds that you mentioned as well.
Actually, it's been more FX tailwinds.
Tailwinds.
Tailwinds.
This year.
This year.
That's right.
Again, I don't think a lot's going to be changing. I think hopefully with some of these deals, just to get stability is going to be helpful. I think both the OEMs and ourselves just want to know what it is, and then we'll figure out the right path because you don't want to jump and head down a direction and says, "Oh, we renegotiated from 50% back down to 10%." That changes all the math for the decision to make a relocation. We are kind of being cautious and kind of waiting for things to settle down. I do think probably the I think we're getting closer to that. I think the USMCA is probably the biggest opportunity and/or risk that we see kind of going into next year. I think we've got we know the direction is going to be.
They're going to probably want more USMCA compliant as a percentage to qualify. If there's opportunities for us to get competitive prices out of US suppliers, that's probably something that we'll look at as well.
Could you talk a bit about any changes you've seen in the competitive landscape given all the changes this year and whether there's been opportunity for you guys to maybe take share or where there could be opportunities looking forward?
Yeah, I mean, I think we've been taking share throughout the decade because we were one of the few folks that kind of says, "Hey, we believe combustion engines are going to be around for a long, long time." When we spun, nobody believed us. You can see that in the share price. We couldn't get debt. The refinancing that we did, it was phenomenal. I think we took it down 200-250 basis points of our debt cost because when we spun, people thought we were going to die. We had two or three years of cash flow, and then it was EVs were going to take over the world. We knew that wasn't the case. From our perspective, we kept investing in combustion, more focus on commercial industrial applications, more focus on internal alternative energy, internal alternative fuels.
That's played out really well for us. From our standpoint, we kept investing. We have the right technology. A lot of our competitors who stopped or exited, whether you look at a Conti or Vitesco or Morelli, they were kind of smaller market share. They've already started to exit on the light vehicle side. Even some of the larger competitors have pulled back. That's why I think we've continued to gain market share. On our GDI, I think we were probably in the low teens earlier this decade. We have a pretty clear path to get to the 20% plus by the end of the decade.
On market share on the aftermarket side, I always do the flip to what Brady forgets to talk about. I mean, the biggest one lately, obviously, has been First Brands.
We're looking at some of their product that's out there, but we're only going to take it if it's at the right price because there's no reason to take it if it's not going to be accretive to whatever is what we already have.
Yeah. Yeah. The AAPEX, we're at AAPEX. We were out there all last week. Everybody talked about First Brands and the FX. There is a lot of blood in the water right now. Everybody's going and meeting with customers, just taking away share. Yeah, there are definitely good opportunities. In our coverage, I'm an EV analyst. That said, I drive an F-150. I think we all can agree.
An F-150 Lightning?
Hey, it is not a Lightning.
Hey, we love EV as well. We just call it economic value. That's what we generate. That's what our focus is.
My point and my question in looking at some of these comments from Ford, GM, some of the conference calls recently, it's very clear that the next few years, especially in North America, there's been a pullback on EV ambitions. You mentioned it earlier from a share perspective, but I guess looking at the whole pie and how that might be expanding in the near term, wondering how some of these announcements or some of these pullbacks may increase the TAM in the near term.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. When we respond, I think the forecast was for combustion engines to decline almost like 5% a year through the decade. That is now backed off to maybe 1% or 2%. And so we were expecting to offset that 5% decline with market share gains. That was kind of our strategy. Now if it is not declining 5% and we still got the market share gains, we feel a little bit more confident in that. Again, even from three years ago, we were working with the likes of BYD and Changan and GM and others with hybrid and new combustion technology. It just was not public. I make the analogy of GM. In 2022, 2023 timeframe, they did a billion-dollar expansion of their Flint engine and truck plant. There was not a press release on it.
Flash forward to this year, hey, we're doing a billion-dollar increase in Tonawanda engine plant. It was front page news. It was the same thing with BYD in China. We were working with them before the spin, but even they realized that you need to have a full suite of technologies. Our view has always been that EVs will continue to gain market share. We just think it's going to plateau at some point in the 2030s or maybe 2040s. There is still going to be 60 million-plus combustion engine out there that's going to have only a few suppliers that can supply them.
Sure. Maybe looking at the aerospace opportunity, which I know you guys have talked about a little bit as well, and pivoting, I guess, from auto, if you could just kind of overview what that opportunity looks like for you and how you're viewing that market.
Yeah, I mean, we were at the Paris Air Show. It's the first time we actually had a booth there. The amount of interest was really strong for a couple of reasons. One, we announced that we won some aerospace business. We're one of the leading manufacturers in the world for a pre and post-injection system. We actually just completed our preliminary quality certification for aerospace certification here in Q3. We're launching our first piece of business in Q4. Our second piece of business launches in next year. Now we're talking with all the major engine manufacturers now because we now have a checkbox that says, "You have your quality certification and you're actually in the business." We've got a couple dozen RFQs and RFIs in the pipeline right now.
We fully expect to continue to announce additional aerospace wins this quarter and into next year. We think our existing customer was like, "Hey, we awarded you a couple of programs. Let's see you launch it first." So far, so good. Things have been going really well. Aerospace is different, obviously a lot more paperwork. They have a few extra requirements. For us, as far as the tolerances, the manufacturing needs, it's actually kind of easy for us. The tolerances they have, the products that they have, it's an easier technology to manufacture. Again, we're working with the customer. In the automotive space and commercial vehicle space, there's no option to be late.
The timing they gave us, I think we ended up supplying our PPAPs and all of our information like a month or two ahead of the original plan, and they did not know what to do. They are used to every single one of their suppliers being late. The fact that we were on time, we met all the requirements, and we were early got them really encouraged, which is why I think we got awarded a couple of programs and we have more in the hopper.
Sure. You mentioned it in the prepared remarks, and I was going to ask about SEM. Wondering if you could just talk a bit more about the decision to bring them into the fold, how integration is going, and then maybe if you want to parlay that together with outlook for future M&A or your willingness to grow inorganically.
Yeah, I mean, we intentionally did a small one first just to kind of because we're newly spun, we still need to build that muscle memory up on doing an acquisition. I mean, we focus small. The focus of our acquisitions are going to be things that have heavy exposure, most exposure to commercial vehicle industrial that come with a nice aftermarket and are somewhat synergistic with the rest of our portfolio. This is one that kind of felt it was a lot of restrictions, small, meeting all those criteria. Oh, by the way, it has to be at a multiple that is lower than our multiple. If we're trading at six times at a time, there's a lot of restrictions. There's not a lot of things out there. We finally found this one.
We actually have been working with them for the last two, three years. We think this adds to our alternative fuels capability, adds to our system capability. There are two other kind of hidden parts with this company. One is they're doing a lot of their own solenoids. That's actually a component that will go inside of a fuel injector. There are some vertical integration opportunities there. Second is they're actually doing some of their own ECUs or engine control units and actually doing some of their own PCBA and SMTs. They're actually populating boards, making controllers, adding the software, and supplying it to customers. That gives us kind of our first manufacturing line for these things. It gives us the ability to start playing around with those electronics and look for options to bring it inside kind of longer term.
It gives us a lot of little pieces at a low valuation, relatively low risk. Obviously, we're still just in the early stages of integration. As we communicated with folks, it's going to be unique as we probably see more dyssynergy in the first year or so because they don't have the HR policies, they don't have the IT systems, they don't have internal audit. We're bringing a lot of our people in to kind of bring them up to speed. We see their growth profile being much higher than ours, the opportunities being much greater. We see a lot of synergy for us to grow them faster than their original plan because now we can leverage our global footprint and scale. Customers sourcing key technology to a $50 million company is difficult. Sourcing one to a $3.5 billion global company is a lot easier.
We see some good opportunities for growth in the long term.
Sure. And then maybe just to the second point of that question about appetite for future and what you may be looking at.
Going to be similar. The amount of resources it takes to acquire a $50 million company is the same diligence that you need to do for a $500 million company. We are probably not looking at that small, but we will look more. Again, when we take a look at opportunities, it has to fit from a portfolio standpoint, from a technology standpoint, but it also has to be a better deal for shareholders than buying back our own stock. We are always going to make that decision on making that comparison. We backed away from some because we thought, one, there was too much risk, or two, actually, it was a good valuation, but we thought there was a little bit of too much risk. We backed off and we just continued to buy back shares.
It's always going to be in that realm of, is it a better deal than buying back our shares? We will take a look at that on a quarterly basis and review that with the board, setting up a plan on what we want to do this quarter. Our debt is low. We continue to generate cash. We need to continue to deploy it.
Sure. A couple of minutes left, and I want to give you guys time for some closing comments as well, but maybe just to sneak a few other quick ones in. I think it was on the most recent call, there were a few questions about the Ford fuel pump recall. Could you maybe give an update on that?
No. There's no update. I mean, it's continuing to work with them. There's nothing that we've accrued for. There's no additional risk. We continue to feel confident in our position.
Sure. Maybe just bridging from this year's financial performance, and you gave some of the long-term outlook and the targets of the business longer term, could you just talk through how you bridge from now until that model and how long that may ultimately take?
Yeah, I mean, people have kind of highlighted, hey, since 2021, your average growth rate's not in that 2-4%. Therefore, you're a little bit below. You're going to have to have some higher growth rates in the outer years in order to get to that 2-4%. And we are still confident in that 2-4%. Since we've spun, we went from a peak industrial commercial vehicle market to now we're in a trough. As it comes back up, we think that will continue to allow us to grow back that CV business. We've got market share gains on light passenger vehicle. We see our aftermarket business being that consistent, roughly 3-6% organic Kager as well. Still confident in that.
I think we saw a little bit of momentum from first half to second half as far as both revenues and profitability. We think we have some good momentum going into 2026. A lot of people may be over-exaggerating just kind of a Q4 number. I think we're finally getting back to our normal cyclicality where Q1 and Q4 are light, Q2 and Q3 are stronger. That is kind of a normal cyclicality for us. We always kind of tell people, don't just look at any one individual quarter. Take a look at a half at least. The first half versus second half year over year, those are better comparisons because we tend to have a little bit too much noise in an individual quarter.
Sure. I'll give you the last minute for closing remarks, but I guess just last question for me. If you were to force rank buying back stock, organic growth, M&A, just capital allocation, generally speaking.
I think organic, those are probably generally the lowest risk. Again, they always have to meet our 15% cost of capital hurdle rate. That's our full stop for organic. We know the business. That's going to be number one. Number two is protecting the dividend and along with our attractive debt leverage. Those are probably the most important. Again, whether it's M&A or buying back stock, I consider buying back stock like an M&A. Which one would I rather buy myself where I know the business plan, I know what's going on, I have a five-year vision, and I know there's less risk to it, or an M&A that may be attractive, but it's going to have risk. We're always going to take a look at it that way.
Sure. All right.
I agree.
Great. We'll leave it there. Thank you very much, guys. Appreciate the time.
Thank you.